The Gun Becomes Your Enemy When it Becomes Your Best Friend

   As I read a story of how a devout Mormon teenager in Oregon took a gun to school and killed a fellow student Tuesday, I thought back to a blog I posted about three weeks ago. The story said Jared Michael Padget had a fascination with guns.
  And, I thought of what I had written: "The gun becomes an enemy to society when it becomes its best friend." Had the gun become too much of a friend to Padgett? He loved guns. I do not know what brought him to do what he did, but I do wonder if his love of guns was part of it. For all the good we see in guns, we should not overlook the influence they might have on us. We err if we speak with pride of how our  guns can rip the heart out of another person. If we find pride in the act of administering death, the gun is stirring up the dark side in us. The power of a gun over us comes as we are tempted to find joy in what that gun might do to another person.
   Plant a thought, reap an action, it is said, and are we not to believe that?
   No, I do not know if Padgett ever expressed joy in the power of what a gun could do. But I hear many speak with pride of the damage a gun can do, and I have always narrowed my eyes at such talk, realizing where it could lead. So, Padgett was a straight arrow Mormon boy? Even a good person can go wrong if given the wrong influences. Though it might anger you that I should refer to a gun as a bad influence, please consider that it can become such. How much do you love it? The gun becomes your enemy when it becomes your best friend. If you are not careful, a gun will change your heart and damage it as much as it will damage the heart of the person it is fired at.